How the Overseas Got HereVacheron Constantin has been making watches since 1755, and for most of that history the catalog looked the part: dress pieces, grand complications, decorative work that took its cues from the manufactory's roots in Geneva. The Overseas fits none of that. Launched in 1996, it was built to compete in the sport-luxury tier that the Royal Oak and the Nautilus had defined over the previous two decades, and its brief was explicitly functional: a watch that could do what those watches did, wearing Vacheron's name.It never quite matched its rivals in cultural dominance. Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe built waiting lists; Vacheron built a watch that serious collectors tended to discover rather than queue for. That discovery dynamic has had a lasting effect on how each generation trades today, and it is part of what makes the Overseas an interesting model to understand.